


in the forest you are reborn

by insouciantmouse



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, Rebirth, not sure where on canon timeline this is but... who knows, so adam's not dead guys he's just. buried. which tbh? mood, which is why i wrote this i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 12:02:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16136819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insouciantmouse/pseuds/insouciantmouse
Summary: adam and ronan dream in cabeswater





	in the forest you are reborn

_From the earth you are reborn_  
_in the forest you are reborn_  
_by another's blood and pain you are reborn_  
_drink this water, eat this fruit_  
_feel that you are alive_  
_like a snake slipping from an old skin,_  
_like a plant growing out of the dark earth,_  
_you are new._

Adam dreams. He is buried in a shallow grave. He can breathe, and he doesn't feel dead, but here he lies. Eyes closed, somewhere between sleep and waking. He can feel the heartbeat of the earth around him.

Ronan dreams. He walks through the forest. It's daylight, but only just: early morning, light slanting through the trees. The forest whispers to him, and he hears: Adam is here. He looks around and doesn't see Adam. He walks on. Through the trees, he sees a patch of disturbed earth, as if somebody dug it up and then put it back down, mounded over something. It's a rectangle maybe 6'x3'. Ronan isn't sure what it means. There's usually no human alteration to Cabeswater, but this mound with its careful corners looks too square to be coincidental. He doesn't know what to do. In the corner of his mind, the forest whispers again: Adam is here. Adam is here. Ronan looks down, anxiety blooming in his mind like a corpse flower. He looks up at the trees accusingly. “What do you mean?!” his voice is loud in the quiet morning.  
Adam is here. Adam is here. The trees whisper.  
Do these stupid trees mean that Adam is in there, dead? That he will be there dead sometime? That Ronan could accidentally take Adam's dead body back to waking with him?  
He shakes his head free of the thoughts and concentrates on what the trees are trying to tell him. They whisper, and he hears: he is not dead. He is ready to live. He is under, but not far. From the earth he will be reborn.  
Ronan flings himself to his knees at the edge of the grave and starts to dig with his hands. He pushes dirt to the sides and throws it behind him. He starts at an end of the grave, hoping that's where Adam's head is. The dirt is loose, and soon he has a shallow hole in the mound. He keeps digging. Something cuts his hand. He pulls his hand out of the ground and looks. Across his palm is a slash. Blood is dripping onto the soil. The trees whisper: with another's blood and toil he is reborn. He looks down and watches his blood soak into the soil. He keeps digging. Suddenly, the earth moves. At the edge of the hole he's digging, a hand reaches up. It gropes in the air. He reaches out and grasps it with his bloody hand and it grabs back and holds on tight. He recognizes this hand, the scars on its fingers and the blunt nails. The freckles, the grimy skin around them. It's Adam's. He has to keep digging. He doesn't want to let go. He squeezes one more time and lets go, moves to start unearthing the arm. The hand stays above the ground and stays still. He reaches the elbow, the shoulder, and then carefully reaches for the dirt that covers where Adam's face must be. He reaches, starts moving dirt away. But then the piles of dirt that he hasn't moved past the edges of the hole creep back. Dirt rains back in. frantically, he pushes away the pile of dirt. He goes back to digging, terrified his hands will not find Adam fast enough and terrified his hands will hurt Adam if he digs too fast. And suddenly there he is. His closed eyes, his dusty nose, his lips barely parted, his hair full of soil. Ronan digs out his head, his shoulders, his chest covered in a dirty blue tee shirt. He gets to Adam's waist, his denim-clad thighs, his knees bare through holes in his jeans, finally his feet- which are bare and look heartbreakingly vulnerable in the dirt- and then sits back, unsure what to do. Adam looks asleep, or worse. Ronan moves back to his head, carefully slides his hand under Adam's head. He lifts, and Adam moves with him. He puts an arm under Adam's shoulders and raises him up. He doesn't feel fully like deadweight. Ronan kneels in the grave with him, supporting Adam's head and shoulders against his own torso. He brushes dirt off Adam's eyelids. Adam still doesn't move. Ronan starts to get scared again. Maybe the forest messed up. Maybe this isn't how it's supposed to happen. Maybe he didn't dig Adam out fast enough.  
He says hoarsely, “Adam, please wake up. Adam, you asshole, this isn't funny. Wake the fuck up.”

Adam opens his quiet brown eyes. He takes a shuddering breath (was he breathing before? Ronan can't remember) and says, “Ronan?”  
“i'm here, I...”  
Adam looks around. “This is a dream. This is Cabeswater.”  
“Yeah.”  
“I was buried. Now i'm not.”  
“Yeah.”  
Adam swallows with difficulty. Ronan looks around for water or something to offer him, remembers this is a magic forest, and asks Cabeswater for a glass of water. He hands it to Adam. Adam drinks. When he's done, he looks around and seems to realize he's sitting in a shallow grave with Ronan. He scrambles out, and Ronan helps him when halfway through his legs almost give out. He's weak as a newborn calf.  
“why do you think....?” Ronan asks.  
Adam considers the question. He knows, but he can't put it into words. He spends a minute feeling his heartbeat through his skin, the breeze against his face, the warmth of Ronan beside him. He feels more alive than he's felt in weeks. The rush of homework and shifts at boyd's and the factory and his friends, Ronan's crises and Gansey's frenetic search and noah's death he keeps reliving and blue's unpredictable moods, it's all been piling up for weeks. He feels new. He feels like it's been washed out of him, all the stress and fatigue.  
And suddenly Adam is hungry. He looks around. A tree branch stretches toward him, moving as if in a breeze while all the ones around it are still, and on it are peaches. He takes a ripe peach, colored with splashes of bright red and soft orange, and bites into it. Juice runs down his chin as he eats. Halfway through, he turns to offer the peach to Ronan. Ronan is watching him, as intent on Adam's face as Adam is on the fruit. He takes the fruit from Adam, takes a bite, hands it back. "i think it's time we woke up," says Adam.  
In their separate bedrooms, both boys open their eyes. Adam falls back into dreamless sleep. Ronan paces around his room and wonders. In the morning, Ronan and Gansey will pick Adam up for school, and Ronan will not ask about the dream. Adam will not talk about the dream. Someday, when they are falling asleep together, they will softly tell each other the story of when Ronan found Adam buried, and helped him return to life.

**Author's Note:**

> huh so i just like the concept of symbolic burial (of a live person) and then they come back up. kinda inspired by black panther ig but also land art stuff involving graves.  
> this is kinda a first draft lmao


End file.
